till this important trial should be decided. The challenge was accepted, and the earl victorious. The shield which he presented to the duke before the tournament began is exhibited in Vertue's valuable plate of the Arundel family, and was actually in the possession of the late duke of Norfolk.

These heroic vanities did not, however, so totally engross the time which Surrey spent in Italy, as to alienate his mind from letters: he studied with the greatest success a critical knowledge of the Italian tongue; and, that he might give new lustre to the name of Geraldine, attained a just taste for the peculiar graces of the Italian poetry.

"He was recalled to England, for some idle reason, by the king, much sooner than he expected; and he returned home the most elegant traveller, the most polite lover, the most learned nobleman, and the most accomplished gentleman of his age. Dexterity in tilting, and gracefulness in managing a horse under arms, were excellencies now viewed with a critical eye, and practised with a high degree of emulation. In 1540, at a tournament held in the presence of the court at Westminster, and in which the principal of the nobility were engaged, Surrey was distinguished above the rest for his address in the use and exercise of arms; but his martial skill was not solely displayed in the parade and ostentation of these domestic combats. In 1542 he marched into Scotland as a chief commander in his father's army, and was conspicuous for his conduct and bravery at the memorable battle of Flodden-field, where James the Fourth of Scotland was killed."

The only other passage in which Mr. Warton improves upon his authorities is a very proper addition to the above account of lord Surrey's travels.

"Among these anecdotes of Surrey's life, I had almost forgot to mention what became of his amour with the fair Geraldine. We lament to find that Surrey's devotion to this lady did not end in a wedding; and that all his gallantries and verses availed so little. No memoirs of that incurious age have informed us whether her beauty was equalled by her cruelty, or whether her ambition prevailed so far over her gratitude, as to tempt her to prefer the solid glories of a more splendid title, and ample fortune, to the challenges and the compliments of so magnanimous, so faithful, and so eloquent a lover. She appears, however, to have been afterwards the third wife of Edward Clinton, earl of Lincoln. Such also is the power of time and accident over amorous vows, that even Surrey himself outlived the violence of his passion: he married Frances, daughter of John, earl of Oxford, by whom he left several children. One of his daughters, Jane, countess of Westmoreland, was among the learned ladies of that age, and became famous for her knowledge of the Greek and Latin languages."

It is truly wonderful that lord Orford and Mr. Warton, delighted as they were with the "romantic air" of lord Surrey's travels, should by any enchantment have been prevented from inquiring whether the events which they have placed between the years 1536 and 1546, when lord Surrey died, were at all consistent with probability had they made the slightest inquiry into the age of lord Surrey, although the precise year and day of his birth might not have been recoverable, they could not have failed to obtain such information as would have thrown a suspicion on the whole story of his knighterrantry.

The birth of lord Surrey may be conjectured to have taken place some time between the years 1515 and 1520: my opinion, which however I do not mean to obtrude, is in

3 It is perhaps unnecessary to point out the many little embellishments in this story, for which we are entirely indebted to Mr. Warton's elegant pen. C,

favour of the former year, or one earlier than 1520*. He was, it is universally agreed, the school companion of the duke of Richmond, who died in 1536, in his seventeenth year; and if we allow that Surrey was two or three years older", it will not much affect the high probability that he was a very young man at the time when his biographers made him fall in love with Geraldine, and maintain her beauty at Florence. None of the portraits of Surrey, as far as the present writer has been able to ascertain, mention his age, except that in the picture-gallery at Oxford, on which is inscribed that he was beheaded in "1547, æt. 27" the inscription, indeed, is in a hand posterior to the date of the picture (supposed to be by Holbein); but it may have been the hand of some successful inquirer; and that in Arundel castle, which is inscribed æt. 29. None of the books of peerage notice his birth or age, nor are these circumstances inserted on his monument at Framlingham. Conjecture, it has been already observed, supposes him to have been born sometime between 1515 and 1520: if we take the earliest of these dates, it will still remain that his biographers have either crowded more events into his life than it was capable of holding, or that they have delayed his principal adventures until they become undeserving of credit, and inconsistent with his character.

Mr. Warton observes, that "it is not precisely known at what period the earl of Surrey began his travels;" but this is a matter of little consequence in refuting the account usually given of those travels, because all his biographers are agreed that he did not set out before the year 1536: at this time he had ten years only of life before him, which have been filled up in a very extraordinary manner. First he travels over a part of Europe, vindicating the beauty of Geraldine; in 1540 he is celebrated at the justs at Westminster; in 1542 he goes to Scotland with his father's army; in 1543 (probably) he is imprisoned for eating flesh in Lent; in 1544-5 he is commander at Boulogne; and lastly, amidst all these romantic adventures or serious events, he has leisure to marry the daughter of the earl of Oxford, and beget five children; which we may suppose would оссиру at least five or six of the above ten years, and these not the last five or six years, for we find him a widower a considerable time before his death. Among other accusations whispered in the ear of his jealous sovereign, one was his continuing unmarried (an expression which usually denotes a considerable length of time) after the period when a second marriage might be decent, in order that he might marry the princess Mary, in the event of the king's death, and so disturb the succession of Edward.

The placing of these events in this series would render the story of his knighterrantry sufficiently improbable, were we left without any information respecting the date of Surrey's marriage; but that event renders the whole impossible, if we wish to preserve any respect for the consistency of his character: Surrey was actually married

In his letter addressed to the lords of the council when he was in the Tower, previous to his trial and execution, we find him more than once pleading his youth: he requests their lordships to "impute his error to the furie of rechelesse youth"-" Let my youth, unpractised in durance, obtain pardon"-" Neither am I the first young man that, governed by fury, bath enterprised such things as he hath afterwards repented." These expressions give some countenance to the supposition that the dates on his portraits above-mentioned are nearly right. See the above letter in Mr. Park's valuable edition of The Royal and Noble Authors. C.

5 My Oxford correspondent informs me that Richmond was a year older than Surrey. C.

before the commencement of his travels in pursuit or in defence of Geraldine's beauty. His eldest son Thomas, fourth duke of Norfolk, was eighteen years old when his grandfather died in 1554°: he was consequently born in 1536; and his father, it is surely reasonable to suppose, was married in 1535'. It would therefore be unnecessary to examine the story of Surrey's romantic travels any farther, if we had not some collateral authorities which may still show that whatever may be wrong in the present statement, it is certain that there is very little right in the common accounts which have been read and copied without any suspicion.

If it be said that Surrey's age is not exactly known, and therefore allowing 1536 the date of his travels to be erroneous, it is possible that he might have been enamoured of Geraldine long before this; and it is possible that his travels might have commenced in 1526, or any other period founded on this new conjecture: this, however, is as improbable as all the rest of the story; for it can be decidedly proved that there was no time for Surrey's gallantries towards Geraldine, except the period which his biographers, however absurdly, have assigned, namely, when he was a married man. The father of lady Elizabeth, the supposed Geraldine, married in 1519 one of the daughters of Thomas Grey, marquis of Dorset, and by her had five children, of whom Elizabeth was the fourth, and therefore probably not born before the year 1523 or 1524: if Surrey's courtship, therefore, must be carried further back, it must be carried to the nursery; for even in 1536, when we are told he was her knight-errant, she could not have been more than eleven or twelve years old: let us add to this a few particulars respecting Geraldine's husband. She married Edward lord Clinton: he was born in 1512, was educated in the court, and passed his youth in those magnificent and romantic amusements which distinguished the beginning of Henry VIII's reign; but did not appear as a public character until the year 1544, when he was thirty-two years of age, Geraldine about twenty-four, and Surrey within two years of his death, and most probably a widower. This earl of Lincoln had three wives; the date of his marriage with any of them is not known, nor how long they lived; but Geraldine was the third and only one by whom he had no children, and who survived his death, which took place in 1584, thirty-eight years after the death of Surrey. Mr. Warton, in his earnest desire to connect her with Surrey, insinuates that she might have been either cruel, or that, her "ambition prevailed so far over her gratitude, as to tempt her to prefer the solid glories of a more splendid title and ample fortune, to the challenges and the compliments of so magnanimous, so faithful, and so eloquent a lover." On this it is only necessary to remark, that the lady's ambition might have been as highly gratified by marrying the accomplished and gallant Surrey, the heir of the duke of Norfolk, as by allying herself to a nobleman of inferior talents and rank; but of his two conjectures, Mr. Warton seems most to adhere to that of cruelty, for he adds that "Surrey himself outlived his amorous vows, and married the daughter of the earl of Oxford." This, however, is as little deserving of serious examination as the ridiculous story of Cornelius Agrippa showing Geraldine in a glass, which Anthony Wood found in Drayton's Heroical Epistle, or probably, as Mr. Park thinks, took it from Nash's fanciful Life of Jack Wilton, published in 1594; where, under the character of his hero, he professes to

6 Collins, &c. C.

If, according to the conjecture of some, he was born in 1515, he was now twenty years of age; but had he been born in 1520, the more usual supposition, there are not wanting instances of as early marriages in past times: the duke of Richinond, we find, died a married man at seventeen. C.

have travelled to the emperor's court as page to the earl of Surrey. But it is unfortunate for this story, wheresoever borrowed, that Agrippa was no more a conjurer than any other learned man of his time; and that he died at Grenoble the year before Surrey is said to have set out on his romantic expedition. Drayton has made a similar mistake in giving Surrey as one of the companions of his voyage, the great sir Thomas More, who was beheaded in 1535, a year likewise before Surrey set out. Poetical authorities, although not wholly to be rejected, are of all others to be received with the greatest caution; yet it was probably Drayton's Heroical Epistle which led Mr. Warton into so egregious a blunder as that of our poet being present at Flodden-field in the year 1513. Dr. Sewell, indeed, in the short memoir prefixed to his edition of Surrey's poems, asserts the same; but little credit is due to the assertion of a writer who at the same time fixes Surrey's birth in 1520, seven years after that memorable battle was fought.

It is now time to inquire whether the accounts hitherto given can be confirmed by internal evidence. It has been so common to consider Geraldine as the mistress of Surrey, that all his love poems are supposed to have a reference to his attachment to that lady. Mr. Warton begins his narrative by observing that "Surrey's life throws so much light on the character and subjects of his poetry, that it is almost impossible to consider the one without exhibiting a few anecdotes of the other." We have already seen what those anecdotes are; how totally irreconcileable with probability, and how amply refuted by the dates which his biographers, unfortunately for their story, have uniformly furnished. When we look into the poems we find the celebrated sonnet to Geraldine the only specious foundation for his romantic attachment; but as that attachment and its consequence cannot be supported without a continual violation of probability, and in opposition to the very dates which are brought to confirm it, it seems more safe to conjecture that this sonnet was one of our author's earliest productions, addressed to Geraldine, a mere child, by one who was only not a child, as an effort of youthful gallantry in one of his interviews with her at Hunsdon. Whatever credit may be given to this conjecture, for which the present writer is by no means anxious, it is certain that if we reject it, or some conjecture of the same import, and adopt the accounts given by his biographers, we cannot proceed a single step without being opposed by invincible difficulties. There is no other poem in Surrey's collection that can be proved to have any reference to Geraldine; but there are two with the same title, viz. The Complaint of the absence of her lover being upon the Sea, which are evidently written in the character of a wife lamenting the absence of her husband, and tenderly alluding to "his faire litle sonne." Mr. Warton indeed finds Geraldine in the beautiful lines beginning "Give place, ye lovers, here before;" and from the lines "Spite drave me into Boreas reign," infers that her anger drove him into a colder climate, with what truth may now be left to the reader: but another of his conjectures cannot be passed over. "In 1544," he says, "lord Surrey was field-marshal of the English army in the expedition to Boulogne, which he took. In that age love and arms constantly went together; and it was amidst the fatigues of this protracted campaign that he composed his last sonnet called The Fancies of a wearied Lover: but this is a mere supposition. The poems of Surrey are without dates, and were arranged by their first editor without any attention to a matter of so much importance. The few

See Drayton's works, vol. IV. p. 96. et seq. C.

allusions made to his personal history in these poems are very dark; but in some of them there is a train of reflections which seems to indicate that misfortunes and disappointments had dissipated his quixotism, and reduced him to the sober and serious tone of a man whose days had been " few and evil." Although he names his productions songs and sonnets, they have less of the properties of either than of the elegiac strain. His scripture-translations appear to be characteristic of his mind and situation in his latter days: what, unless a heart almost broken by the unnatural conduct of his friends and family, could have induced the gay and gallant Surrey, the accomplished courtier and soldier, to console himself by translating these passages from Ecclesiastes which treat of the shortness and uncertainty of all human enjoyments, or those Psalms which direct the penitent and the forsaken to the throne of almighty power and grace? Mr. Warton remarks that these translations of Scripture "show him to have been a friend to the reformation;" and this, which is highly probable, may have been one reason why his sufferings were embittered by the neglect, if not the direct hostility, of some of his relations. The translation of the Scriptures into prose was but just tolerated in his time; and to familiarize them by the graces of poetry must have appeared yet more obnoxious to the enemies of the reformation. I have said some of his relations; his father I should hope cannot be enumerated in this class. After Surrey's execution, his sister, the duchess of Richmond, took care of the education of his children, and engaged Fox the martyrologist to be their tutor; and the duke, when this zealous protestant was pursued by the bloody Gardiner, screened him from his fury; and when he found it no longer safe to keep him, conveyed him abroad in spite of Gardiner's vigilance. This surely was not the act of a bigotted papist.

Although the present writer has taken some liberties with the historian of English poetry in his account of Surrey's life, he has not the presumption to omit Mr. Warton's elegant and just criticism on his poems. "Surrey, for justness of thought, correctness of style, and purity of expression, may justly be pronounced the first English classical poet. He unquestionably is the first polite writer of love-verses in our language, although it must be allowed that there is a striking native beauty in some of our loveverses written much earlier than Surrey's." It is also worthy of notice, that while all his biographers send him to Italy to study its poetry, Mr. Warton finds nothing in his works of that metaphysical cast which marks the Italian poets, his supposed masters, especially Petrarch. "Surrey's sentiments are for the most part natural and unaffected, arising from his own feelings, and dictated by the present circumstances: his poetry is alike unembarrassed by learned allusions, or elaborate conceits. If our author copiés Petrarch, it is Petrarch's better manner; when he descends from his Platonic abstractions, his refinements of passion, his exaggerated compliments, and his play upon opposite sentiments, into a track of tenderness, simplicity, and nature. Petrarch would have been a better poet had he been a worse scholar: our author's mind was not too much overlaid by learning."

The translation of the two books of the Eneid is "executed with fidelity, without a prosaic servility; the diction is often poetical, and the versification varied with proper pauses." Its principal merit, however, is that of being the first specimen in the English language of blank verse, which was at that time growing fashionable in the Italian poetry. It is very probable that he intended to have translated the whole; and he is so much more elegant and correct in this than in his other translations, that the Eneid appears to have been the production of his happier days, The other authors